An Accident

Contributor: Dan Nielsen

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Pamela Wilson sat in the car working a crossword puzzle while her husband Glenn and her son Billy grocery shopped. She heard Billy's voice, looked up, and saw him running through the parking lot. Billy got in and sat crouched over as though in pain. He cried. He sucked his thumb. He rocked back and forth. He looked at his mother.
“Billy, what’s wrong?" Pamela said.
Billy said, “Daddy fell.”
“How did he fall?” Pamela said
“On his head,” Billy pointed to his own head.
“Is he okay?”
“No.”
Pamela, in robe and slippers, wasn’t about to get out of the car. She flipped open her cell phone. She flipped it shut.
“Billy, tell me exactly what happened.”
Billy took a breath. “Daddy had eggs. He dropped them and stepped in it. His legs flew up and he landed on his head.”
An ambulance, lights flashing and siren wailing, pulled into the parking lot and stopped by the supermarket door. A small crowd made way.
Pamela’s cell phone rang. The Caller ID said Piggly Wiggly. Pamela turned off the phone and started the car.
“Billy, put on your seat belt.”
“What about daddy?”
“He’ll be fine,”
Back at the house, Pamela applied makeup and chose a matching skirt and blouse. Billy asked if he could watch TV.


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I have almost no imagination, but what little I have is extremely vivid.
I can foresee the future, but only the foreseeable future.
I am a autodidactic uniglot.
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I'm Not Finished Yet

Contributor: Rich Ives

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Whence the migration of pain. Whence the horror. A happy little bumpkin wets his willy and the jig is up. It doesn't hurt so much. He can't hurt so much without experience.
Sometimes duty gets delivered to the wrong address. A package of surgical sponges instead of dinner. A piece of the right patient through the wrong end of the microscope.
Whence the incumbent derives his verity. While we wander the garden paths below the hospital with our own. It’s a big hurt and we love it dearly, sugarpants.
She wanted more and he just wanted.
The child of knowledge and the child of ignorance. Both chopping the same onion.
A big hurt indeed and we came down from the towers into the land of breaking and keeping, into the land of another before us.


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Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. An interview and18 hybrid works appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.
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